The phrase “collision leaking species”
appears in several panels of Maggie O’Sullivan’s provocative
work murmur, a sequence of text-based artworks and collages
excerpted in this issue’s Work/book section.
As its title suggests, murmur is a graphic and partial account
of what remains unaccountable and, in some way, unaccounted for: material
whispers, the mechanics of an earthly undercarriage, iterations or ruptures
occurring at a heart level — barely discernible by some readings
and catastrophic by others. Category is torn open in O’Sullivan’s
work, as formal fragments permute through a complex series of operations
and terrains. murmur is a work made for wall and floor, to
be shifted about, as O’Sullivan explains to Dell Olsen in an interview
to accompany the feature. It literalizes a step off the page
and into physical space, while acknowledging in its primary textiles
(A4 pages) the plastic, flexible and pervasive temper of writing media.
As O’Sullivan says, murmur develops the poetic work as
“a multidimensional, kinaesthetic, sentient terrain or environment
for the body to enter and move through.” It is a form of “social
sculpture” (Joseph Beuys), powerful in rejecting aesthetics of
neatly commodified sameness: “fabricators of canons don’t
want awkwardnesses.”

Our Spring 2004 edition of How2 is a rich
social sculpture, an electronic labyrinth that invites readers to abandon
some formal and aesthetic presumptions as they “enter and move
through” the site. In gesturing toward spatiality and disruption,
“Collision Leaking Species” provides an exemplary title.
Thematics of resistance, interface, habitat and leakage have emerged
across all sections of this issue during production. They bear witness
to a dazzling and intelligent range of poetic responses to current social,
political and cultural weathers.

Each word in the phrase “Collision Leaking Species” is
discrete, yet all three are brought into facing by their arrangement.
A sharp kinesis occurs. “Collision” and “species”
seem to be from antithetical points on a plane of events: collision
implies the force of accident, while species denotes the controlling
order of taxonomies and nomenclatures. They come into encounter through
a leaking middle to produce an uncanny synthesis. To “leak
species” might be to spill beyond standardizing charts into which
we have arranged living systems. Or it might suggest new genres and
kinds; perhaps those defying name, or un-writing prior “knowledges”.
To follow species-logic for a moment, the word “species”
emerges from specere, which also subtends the words “spectate”
and “specular” — to look or gaze upon in a classificatory
and objectifying manner; and also, in a less alienating light, to regard
the world with a heightened sense of vigilance and inventive perception
(“speculation”). Complicated habitats and damaging occupations,
such as those shown daily in news media, require the attunements of
critical thinking and creative action.

Thalia Field’s zoologic is one of the most interesting
and ambitious works in this new edition of How2. Field scrutinizes
the ideological architectures of “the species house”, with
its “critical distance doled out in centimeters.” Via the
animation of written text accompanied by sound, Field traverses ideational
ground that connects place and spatiality (“she thinks spatially”);
corporeality, gender, technology, capture and territory; ecological
imperialism; and notions of home, foreignness and displacement —
all punctuated by satirical insights about Heideggerean concepts of
habitas and their philosophical reception. Her use of a “chorus”
creates a skew in histories of dramaturgy. Field’s electronic
text is made to reckon with its own means of technological reproduction:
“out of character”, “out of print” and devising
“multiple degrees of freedom”, even as it berates “the
overcooked human packaging of the C21st.” This work defies specification
in a highly informed way. Featured also in Multi-media,
Susan Johanknecht, Hazel Smith, Melissa Benham and Stacey Dacheux give
us works that problematize the borders of informational, bodily and
social discourses, while sharing Field’s welcome engagement with
a poetics of containment and space.

These matters also inflect Frances Presley’s selection of new
poetry in “The Text as a Site of Resistance.”
Tilla Brading and Geraldine Monk provide the stitch and the
fabric with openly political shades of meaning, in relation to
gendered art-making and governmental spin; while Christine Kennedy’s
“Dusting the Mae West Memorial Library” explores links between
sexuality, historical celebrity, image and economy. Sites of embodied
resistance and memory inhabit a wide horizon of everyday circumstance
and experience — as suggested by Andrea Baker’s visual poem
“House”, in which transfigurations of bodies and dwellings
occur in response to located grief. Hilda Bronstein’s selection
of papers from the London TALKS series offers a range of perspectives
on embodiment, genre and location (In-Conference),
while mapping a site-specific event of critical community.

Three Special Features in this issue celebrate three
very different exponents of poetic narrative, its habitats and (dis)contents.
Our much-anticipated critical focus on innovative writer Leslie
Scalapino presents the full text of Scalapino’s ‘Can’t’
Is ‘Night’ — a demanding and astute response
to U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the occupations
of language that establish and annihilate the bounds of meaning for
that conflict. Made by writer Rob Holloway in London, a recording of
Scalapino reading the work is available for listening. Scalapino’s
phenomenological “poetic of occurrence structures” is investigated
in critical pieces by section coordinator Laura Hinton, Elisabeth Frost,
Jeanne Heuving, Alicia Cohen and Camille Martin; while Zack, who has
collaborated with Scalapino to produce several of her performance texts
live, writes about the difficulties and pleasures of staging her writings.
In a lengthy interview with Anne Brewster, Scalapino describes her poetic
in terms of a kinesis of being — such that a person becomes somehow
inseparable from their surroundings, while consciously detaching from
the ideational coercions of mass media: “I’m interested
in seeing oneself as a motion, or one’s interior ideas, thoughts,
almost as small minute movements that are placed against a sense of
the socially constructed, to create separation as a transformation of
one’s own mind.”

“Seeing oneself as a motion” could apply equally to the
enduring narrative gifts offered to readers by modernist doyenne Gertrude
Stein. I am very excited in this issue to present “A Narrative
in Escaped Places”, a series of contemporary responses
to Steinian texts and techniques. In their sheer diversity, these pieces
— by Janet Neigh, Carla Harryman, Mary Ann Caws, Michael Farrell,
Mark Byron, Marina Morbiducci and Rob Holloway — remind us that
Stein’s formidable legacy is still unfolding, generations after
her death; and that her oeuvre permits great elasticity of interpretation
and rejoinder. We are honoured to include Mary Ann Caws’ tribute
to feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, a Steinian tracing of a very particular
and circumambulatory friendship between two women. Legacy and interpretation
are in the thematic foreground of Sawako Nagayasu’s compelling
feature on Japanese modernist innovation, in which
Sawako’s crisply balanced translations of Sagawa Chika appear
alongside translations of Ema Shôko by Miryam Sas. A fascinating
essay by leading Japanese critic Arai Toyomi is translated by Janine
Beichman, and provides a valuable account of the socio-cultural context
of modernist experiment by Japanese women poets.

How2 is a biannual journal — and the riches of this
issue may take readers at least six months to unwrap and explore. As
usual, Alerts features an excellent range of reviews
and discussions; while Postcards has gained a new coordinating
editor, Romney Steele, and promises to be revitalized in months ahead.
Please check the Masthead and Updates
pages for details of section coordinators, forthcoming features and
writing events.

I will finish by drawing attention to some questions facing How2.
Electronic journals are a curious (and leaky) species of texts, whose
parameters shift constantly. As a biannual production, How2
still employs a largely print-based aesthetic when organizing its material.
Several of the sections update regularly, but this accounts for a small
part of the journal’s content. How might How2 explore
the capacities of new media — and where to now, for web-based
art forms? What kinds of communities are produced by electronic technologies,
and do web-oriented forms suggest particular issues of participation
and access? Are these topics gendered, linguistic, generational, cultural,
spatial? Is there room for How2 to become more immediately
responsive to the desires and interests of its readers, in relation
to the quick transmissions of electronic technologies? Over the coming
year — and across the borders of many different localities now
involved in this exciting international project — we hope to explore
some of these questions.

My huge thanks to managing editor Dell Olsen (London) and webdesigner
Roberta Sims (Lewisburg, PA), who have worked tirelessly to bring this
edition to light; to all section coordinators for your illuminating
discoveries and patient toil; and to all our contributors and readers,
without whom there would be no journal. Enjoy the issue.